"Distichous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... founder of the church, and under a monumental effigy in one of the transepts lies the wonderful old Countess of Desmond, who having danced in her youth with Richard III. lived through the Tudor dynasty "to the age of a hundred and ten," and, as the old distich tells us, "died by a fall from ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... of the same volume W. W. T. (quoting from D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature a passage which supplies the hexameter completing the distich, and attributes the verses to Sidonius Apollinaris) asks where may be found a legend which represents the two lines to have formed part of a dialogue between the fiend, under the form of a mule, and a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... less than the words of God himself: Ego autem dico vobis: diligite inimicos vestros. If you speak of evil thoughts, turn to the Gospel: De corde exeunt cogitationes malae. If of the fickleness of friends, there is Cato, who will give you his distich: ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... wind. This statement being published in the Athenaeum, a cluster of correspondents averred that the belief is common among seamen, in all parts of the world, and among landsmen too. Some one quoted a distich: ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... and therefore cannot be caught. As they have neither towns nor villages, they must be hunted like wild beasts, and can be fitly compared only to griffins, which beneficent Nature has banished to uninhabited regions." As a Persian distich, quoted by ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Virgil. There is a tale, reported by Donatus, that Vergil once anonymously wrote up on the palace gates a distich in praise of Augustus, which, when nobody was found to own it, was claimed by a certain versifier Bathyllus, whom Caesar duly rewarded, A few days later, however, Virgil again set in the same place a quatrain each line of which commenced 'sic vos non vobis...' but was unfinished, and preceeded these ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... they were reassured by Michael's predictions, and so might well display an engaging briskness; while as for "their solitary way," they were no more solitary than in Paradise, "there being no Body besides Them Two, both here and there." He therefore suggests a distich more ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... Genji closed his eyes but could not sleep, so he started up and, taking writing materials, began to write, apparently without any fixed purpose, and indited the following distich:— ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... old distich which my dry diplomatist came out with yesterday at dinner, on the ancestor of Hampden. The remains of the Hampden estate are in this neighbourhood, and as we were speaking of our wish to see the place in which the patriot ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... of native eloquence: with this trite distich you made hexameters tame; it gushed from that great young heart with a sweet infantine ardour, that even virtue can only pour when young, and youth when virtuous; and, at the words I have emphasised by the poor device of capitals, two ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... poems were still used in the fashion set by the Roman writers,—then the eighteenth century deluged us with ill-natured witty epigrams of the like brief form. It was not until comparatively modern times that our Western world fully recognized the value of the distich, triplet or quatrain for the expression of beautiful thoughts, rather than for the expression of ill-natured ones. But now that the recognition has come, it has been discovered that nothing is harder than to write a beautiful poem of two or four ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... system of small roundish clouds in the upper regions of the atmosphere, commonly moves in a different current of air from that which is blowing at the earth's surface. It forms the mackerel sky alluded to in the following distich:— ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Propertius had put this distich in an elegy in which he narrated a nocturnal promenade between Rome and Tibur. Observe the word Scythiae instead of Scythicis, and especially, feriat, which is the true reading,—the printed texts say noceat. ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... is an admirable portrait, by D. Loggan, taken at his age of eighty-one, and engraved by Burghers. Granger says it is extremely scarce. Beneath the head, which is dated 1675, is this distich:— ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... arranging words in that measure, so that the lines may flow smoothly, that the accents may fall correctly, that the rhymes may strike the ear strongly, and that there may be a pause at the end of every distich, is an art as mechanical as that of mending a kettle or shoeing a horse, and may be learned by any human being who has sense enough to learn anything. But, like other mechanical arts, it was gradually improved by means of many ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... termed by them earthly fire, and its use is prescribed for cooking and other domestic purposes. When once the new fire had thus been drawn from the sun, all the people were free to rekindle their domestic hearths; and, as a Chinese distich ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... M. Edouard Fournier ('L'Esprit des Autres', sixth edition, 1881, p. 288), is simply the readjustment of an earlier quatrain, based upon a Latin distich in the 'Epigrammatum ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... farmer who played the fiddle well. The boy is said at the age of ten to have carved over the door a Latin distich, which, being translated, runs:— ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... is both metrical and rhythmical, equally free from the confused strains of unmoulded genius and from the servile pedantry of conventional rules. The verse of eight syllables is the source of all other metres, and the sloka or double distich is the stanza most frequently used. Though this poetry presents too often extravagance of ideas, incumbrance of episodes, and monstrosity of images, as a general rule it is endowed with simplicity of style, pure coloring, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... wallet and bowl had made the circuit of the table, they were suspended to a pillar in the hall. Each of the company in succession then threw some salt into his goblet, and, placing himself under these symbols of the brotherhood, repeated a jingling distich, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... plurals of the following nouns: town, country, case, pin, needle, harp, pen, sex, rush, arch, marsh, monarch, blemish, distich, princess, gas, bias, stigma, wo, grotto, folio, punctilio, ally, duty, toy, money, entry, valley, volley, half, dwarf, strife, knife, roof, muff, staff, chief, sheaf, mouse, penny, ox, foot, erratum, axis, thesis, criterion, bolus, rebus, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... ladies, she received the satisfactory assurance that none of the prisoners for Wyat's business had been brought to utter any thing by which she could be endangered. Perhaps it was with immediate reference to this intelligence that she wrote with a diamond on her window the homely but expressive distich, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... the Devil's Hedge, which stretches across country from Looe up to Lerryn. Who built this earthwork, or when he did it, or for what purpose, no one can tell; but the Looe folk will quote you the following distich,— ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... visiting which, we returned to the river, came up its valley to Albany, and returned, by way of Salem, to Salisbury. All this was done with one horse, a compact small-boned animal, who was a good oats-eater, and of whom we took the very best care. I made this distich on him:— ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... therefore, without the most cogent reasons that we assert our opinion, that the distich of Pope, "Worth makes the man," or the title appended by Colley Cibber to one of his dramas, "Love makes the man," ought henceforth to yield, in point of truth, to the irrefragable principle which we here solemnly advance, "that it is the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... saint,—that is, a short, strong figure, with the head large, and almost devoid of hair, except at the sides, and one dark lock in the centre of the massive forehead. Over the western door-way is a mosaic of the Virgin with the following leonine and loyal distich beneath it:— ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... much like a caution, and a soldier's motto should urge to daring. So we'll none of that. What do you say to the distich in honor of your great ancestor, Pocahontas's husband, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... lord," she laughed, with a tolerant protest in her voice, "you keep up the credit of your house right nobly. How goes the distich? My mother taught it me upon the bridge of Avignon, where also as here in Scotland the ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... over this one, set round with armchairs encircling a table, all mosaicked with tarsia, . . . while in each compartment of the panelling was the portrait of some famous author, and an appropriate distich. . . . To the right and left of the carriage entrance into the great courtyard are two handsome saloons, each about forty-five feet by twenty-two, and twenty-three in height. That on the left contained the famous library ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... anthology; disjecta membra poetae song[Lat], ballad, lay; love song, drinking song, war song, sea song; lullaby; music &c. 415; nursery rhymes. [Bad poetry] doggerel, Hudibrastic verse[obs3], prose run mad; macaronics[obs3]; macaronic verse[obs3], leonine verse; runes. canto, stanza, distich, verse, line, couplet, triplet, quatrain; strophe, antistrophe[obs3]. verse, rhyme, assonance, crambo[obs3], meter, measure, foot, numbers, strain, rhythm; accentuation &c. (voice) 580; dactyl, spondee, trochee, anapest ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... form of composition. There is, however, probably no one of them all who has done more for the wide extension of its fame among all the ranks and gradations of society than the unknown author of the humble distich, ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... prohibited all spiteful gossip in the conversation in the refectory. In those times of religious struggle, the clerics ferociously blackened each other's characters. Augustin caused to have written on the walls a distich, which ran thus: ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... made by some second-sighted person. King James, of Scotland, the sixth, was taken with an ague, at Trinity-College in Cambridge; he removed to Theobald's; (where he died) sitting by the fire, the carbuncle fell out of his ring into the fire, according to the prediction. This distich is printed in the life of ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... but gives you the swing and the spirit of the distich. Rather hard on CURZON that my popularity should spoil his speech, but a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, July 2, 1892 • Various
... down the slopes to the darkening vale I heard him crooning to himself in a high, quavering voice the single distich; then in a little his weariness took him again, and he plodded on with no ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... great Church at Stratford; where a Monument, decent enough for the Time, is erected to him, and plac'd against the Wall. He is represented under an Arch in a sitting Posture, a Cushion spread before him, with a Pen in his Right Hand, and his Left rested on a Scrowl of Paper. The Latin Distich, which is placed under the Cushion, has been given us by Mr. Pope, or his Graver, ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... distich, lyric, elegy, eclogue, idyl, madrigal, epic, ode, georgic, cid, rondeau, epilogue, epigram, elegiac, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... urged to the utmost, at last obliged to interfere, when the multitude, carrying folly to the extremest bounds, was going to try to resuscitate the dead? In short, do we not remember the amusing distich, affixed at the time to the gate of the Cemetery of ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... and comestibles, From Slater, and Fortnum and Mason; Billiard, ecarte, and chess tables; Water in vast marble basin; Luminous books (not voluminous) To read under beech-trees cacuminous; One friend, who is fond of a distich, And doesn't get too syllogistic; A valet, who knows the complete art Of service—a maiden, his sweetheart: Give me these, in some rural pavilion, And I'll envy no ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... be combined, in order to produce its own effects to any pleasureable purpose. Double and tri-syllable rhymes, indeed, form a lower species of wit, and, attended to exclusively for their own sake, may become a source of momentary amusement; as in poor Smart's distich to the Welsh Squire who ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... tights and tinsel, face to face, Encounters, pink and picturesque. Nor frown, if, in next week's review, His gropings after the artistic Should crop out into verse, and take The form of some SWINBURNIAN distich. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... poet, the author of "The Alexiad," and who, at an entertainment given by some young men of rank, had been dignified with the appellation of "The Arch Poet." Leo used occasionally to send him some dishes from his table; and he was expected to pay for each dish with a Latin distich. One day, as he was attending Leo at dinner, and was ill of the gout, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... or of storm, each in the windowless palace of rest." There was no window in the grave when more illustrious and original skeptics talked about it. Modern infidelity has many expressions on the future after death which sound like the old Roman distich, "I was not, and became; I was, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... labor to sweeten and gild life, to come upon a desert shore, surrounded by the cries of seagulls, and lay thyself, with broken bones, beneath a torpid stone? Was it worth while, in short, noble Porthos, to heap so much gold, and not have even the distich of a poor poet engraven upon thy monument? Valiant Porthos! he still, without doubt, sleeps, lost, forgotten, beneath the rock the shepherds of the heath take for the gigantic abode of a dolmen. And so many twining branches, so many mosses, bent by the bitter ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere |
